


Katabasis

by Rotpeach



Category: Boyfriend to Death (Visual Novels)
Genre: Angst, Astronomy, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Other, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Religious Imagery & Symbolism, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-04-08
Updated: 2017-04-15
Packaged: 2018-10-16 13:12:29
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,512
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10572015
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rotpeach/pseuds/Rotpeach
Summary: Several months after someone precious to you goes missing, a fallen angel wearing their face appears in your living room with an offer you can't refuse.





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hey friends and neighbors its been a while  
> ive mostly migrated to my tumblr, rotworld, since ive been doing a lot of short pieces. but ive got a couple longer works i want to do so im moving back in lol
> 
> in the same vein as enom, this is a reader-insert written in first person to imitate the narration style of the source material. unlike enom, the protagonist's personal life is a little more defined for the sake of the plot and overall its heavier emotionally so please heed the tags to decide if this is for you

“In the beginning,” says the person I love who doesn’t know it yet in a faint memory of better days, “God created the heavens and the earth; molecular clouds the colors of rust and stardust condensing and collapsing into protoplanetary disks, formless baryonic matter spread over the emptiness by cosmic winds.”

It’s November when I close my eyes. We are sitting shoulder to shoulder on a park bench and fall is dying gracefully, gravel-laden snow collecting on the sidewalk. I watch their eyes travel haltingly over a handwritten poem, and it isn’t very good, it’s clumsy and technical and passionless, _an astronomy student has no place writing poetry,_ they say, but I urge them to go on because I want to hear their voice.

“And God said, ‘let there be light,’ and there was a high-velocity contraction of nebulaic material into a dense core, stellar rain nursing an embryonic sun.”

Star-shaped leaves carpet the pavement, red like fire and small stars burning desperately. When they stumble over the words, I urge them to slow down, tell them to take their time. It’s early and we don’t have to be anywhere for a few hours. It’s early and we have our whole lives ahead of us.

It’s early and there’s no reason to think that what we have now will change.

“This is stupid,” they’re saying in this memory, laughing, self-conscious. “I don’t know why I let you talk me into this.”

“It’s good to express yourself,” I’m telling them. “You work with numbers all day, you can relax with some words from time to time.”

They have a certain, weary smile when they’re trying to humor me. It’s small, it’s lopsided, it’s utterly endearing. “Words are harder than numbers,” they say. “Less precise.”

This is the biggest difference between us. Everyone wants clarity, of course, everyone wants to be understood, but there should be room to breathe in the written word, there should be space to dream. If it’s all laid out plainly, then there’s nothing to imagine. I struggle to explain to them the fine line upon which “show don’t tell” balances and fail to get the point across.

“Maybe I should’ve gone from there instead,” they say, disheartened. “That’s the other ‘in the beginning’ part, right? ‘The Word was with God and the Word was God.’ I should’ve used that as a starting point.”

“You can start wherever you want,” I insist, and in this imagination of what actually happened I am gifted with the double-edged sword of hindsight, I am grasping their sleeve and looking into their eyes and I am trying to memorize every detail of the person I love because I know I won’t have the chance later. “Start from the end. Start from the middle somewhere. Skip to the Garden of Eden if it helps.”

They aren’t really interested. They smile that small, humoring smile and close the notebook, hiding words they stayed up all night to write just because I asked them to try. “Maybe next time,” they say, because they don’t know this is their last chance.

It’s April when I open my eyes. Spring is coming, quietly, chasing away the clouds and melting the last of the snow. I pass the park on my way home from campus, stopping just long enough to glance at people gathered in the dappled shade, spreading a blanket on the grass. That’s what we’re supposed to be doing, if there were any “we,” that’s what people as measured as them do to humor people as sentimental as me.

(“‘I am the spirit that negates. And rightly so, for all that comes to be deserves to perish wretchedly.’”

In another memory, I’m blinking, surprised, watching them sit cross-legged next to me on the leaf-covered ground. They’re wearing an argyle sweater and I’m teasing them about it relentlessly just to hide how cute I think they look in it. “You’re reading Faust?” I ask.

They nod. “Almost done with it.” A smile, unguarded and genuine. “You mentioned you were reading it in one of your classes, so I thought I’d give it a try.”

We watch the sunset. Our hands are close together, fingertips almost touching. In a few months, we’ll both be leaving. A radio telescope laboratory in the desert hosts an inescapable gravitational field of guaranteed post-graduation employment, but my orbit is different. I wonder if we’ll ever cross paths again.

“If you were Faust,” they say, “would you have taken that deal? Sold your soul for the best life possible?”

A flock of geese flies overhead, dark blotches on the sunset. “I dunno. I’d think about it at least. You don’t have to read a lot to know deals with demons tend to go poorly, though.”

“How does it go for Faust?”

I look up and find the sunset reflecting in their eyes, red and gold, bright and beautiful. “You’re almost done with it, right? You’ll find out.” And then, emboldened, I add, “We should meet up, right here, under this same tree, tomorrow night. Ask me again then.”

Of course there’s more I want to say. More than Faustian bargains and pseudo-religious astronomical poetry, more than watching the sun blur the horizon and fill the sky with fire, there’s something else that desperately wants to come out.

It longs to be closer than arm’s length. It flutters, pleasantly vulnerable, with every touch. It hangs onto their every word.

The next night, when I return and stand with my back to the tree trunk, as the minutes turn to hours and the moon fades, replaced by the sun creeping over the horizon, my smile waning with the dying night, it cries.)

The oak tree that was supposed to be our meeting place stands in the center of a forking path, branches gnarled, grasping skywards, fallen leaves wasting away in its shade.

 _That would be a good place to die,_ I think.

It’s an easy thing to think about two months after their disappearance, after missing posters slowly faded with the changing seasons and the university-organized volunteer search party had been disbanded. It’s easy to think about going back at night, sitting in the grass and letting the earth take me, and maybe the leaves will be even greener the next time a pair of lovers meets beneath its shade with shaky confessions on their tongues.

 _It would be poetic,_ I’m thinking as I walk up the steps to my front door and turn the key in the lock, so far in my own thoughts that it takes a moment to recognize that someone is standing in my dark living room, waiting. The keys slip from my fingers and clatter on the floor and the door slams shut behind me, but I hardly notice that at all, because someone is speaking in a deep, soothing voice, and I know the words.

“I am the spirit that negates. And rightly so, for all that comes to be deserves to perish wretchedly.”

I think at first it’s a dream. They move soundlessly from the center of the room and they are wearing the face of the person who used to sit in the park beside me between exams, but it’s wrong, the eyes are cold and the smile is jagged and dangerous, and fear is lacing itself through my veins and seizing my breath.

“‘Twere better nothing would begin.”

A hallucination, I tell myself, a daydream born out of desperation. They come closer, so close I could reach out and touch them but I’m afraid to. _A nightmare._

“Thus everything that your terms sin, destruction, evil represent,” says the thing that looks so much like the person I loved, “that is my proper element.”

“Who are you?” I ask hoarsely.

There’s no answer. They look at me with something like pity.

“ _Who the fuck are you_ _?_ ” I demand, grasping the collar of their shirt, trembling, afraid.

One hand rises, reaching for my cheek. “Shouldn’t you be asking _what_ I am instead?”

“Don’t touch me,” I stammer, shoving them away. “What do you want? How’d you get in? I’m gonna call the cops--!”

Something catches my ankle and I fall hard on the wood floor of the entryway, wheezing as I roll onto my back and find they haven’t moved.

“Even if I let you call them,” I hear as they come closer--but not them, not really them, it can’t be, it _can’t_ \--still smiling, “they couldn’t do anything. Nobody could. But you don’t have to worry; I want to help you.”

“What….” I don’t know where to begin, what’s happening, what to say, what to do. I’m never out of words, but every single one I know is failing me. “Why?”

There’s a shifting in the darkness as their face warps and their body distorts, and I’m faced with a stranger whose black wings arch over us like a canopy of dark matter. “I’ve been watching you since they died. I know everything about you; what you like, what you dream of, what you’ve lost.” He kneels in the entryway and smiles down at me like I am an insect he has chosen to spare. “I can fix everything.”

 _Died,_ the word echoes in my head, _they’re dead, I’ve always known, I’ve always known but it still stings, it still makes me want to curl up beneath that tree and never move again._ “What do you mean?” I ask shakily. “Don’t fuck with me. You don’t even--!”

“Returning the dead to life would be a small feat for someone like me.”

I feel my heart pounding in my chest. This can’t be real. Any minute now, my alarm will go off and I’ll wake to the harsh light of another indifferent morning, where the world is still turning without them in it.

I meet the man’s eyes reluctantly, amber ringed by red like a solar flare. “Is that...would it…” I take a deep breath. “Could you really do it?”

“Of course.”

“And it wouldn’t be some trick,” I press. “It’d really be them, just like they used to be, and everything would be okay?”

“As if they were never gone,” he assures me.

(“Why do you wanna meet tomorrow? Did you wanna talk about something? Let’s just talk tonight.”

In another memory, I am shaking my head. “No, let’s just relax tonight. It’s kind of serious, so I wanna leave it for tomorrow.”

“Does it have to do with class?” they ask, frowning. “Or something after graduation?”

“Tomorrow,” I insist.

I don’t think they understand, really. I don’t think they know exactly what it’s about. But they humor me, like they always do, they settle back into the grass and look up at the sky, and I feel all the tension leave my body with them warm at my side.

I’m going to say something, I'm telling myself. Even if there’s nothing between us and things are awkward for months afterwards, if we never speak again after graduating, I just want to say it. What I mistook for sibling-like affection built into something else that I was hesitant to put a name to for fear of scaring it away. I’ve read enough classical literature now, seen the anguished confessions of prostitutes confined to the Yoshiwara pining after kindhearted patrons who would risk their honor and reputation to run away with them, and felt their pain as if it was my own.

The person who humors me, who sits beside me at the park, who writes me five pages of poetry even though they’ve never written a stanza before in their life, deserves to know.

In this memory, our fingers brush when we part ways to go home, and I feel like I’m floating, weightless, in zero-gravity.)

The stranger rests a hand on my cheek in a gesture of mock kindness, and I let him. “What are you willing to do to bring them back?” he asks.

I am beyond hesitation. “Anything,” I say immediately.

And though I tell myself not to show fear, the curl of his lips into a cruel smirk makes me tremble.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> we need like 2500 more words of plot and then the really fun stuff will trickle in lol

“We are lonely,” says the person I love who doesn’t know it yet with much trepidation, “we are spread thin throughout the cosmos, burning, redshifting; our stellar rotation bends and distorts us, and the universe expands at a rate that leaves us breathless as we watch everything we know flee from us; not because it wishes to, but because it has no choice.”

It’s still November. It’s almost always November. We are juggling exam preparation and research and the need for human contact clumsily, never able to get enough of any of it. They hold the notebook in shaking, reddened fingers; they forgot their gloves again today. I want to offer mine, but I don’t want to interrupt.

“We try to speak to each other, flashing Morse code across galaxies, solar flares dancing on our plasmic skin, but our voices are drowned out by the crackle of cosmic background radiation and lost in the rabble. We will listen forever, and we will hear only the faintest memories of words once spoken overlain by white noise.”

They stop suddenly, tearing the page out of their notebook with a frustrated huff, and I am trying to stop them. “This is awful,” they’re saying, “this is worse than the first one. It’s totally directionless.”

“I thought it was wonderful,” I am trying to tell them. “And I don’t think it’s directionless, but so what if it is? Doesn’t that fit the theme?”

This one has a title; _Redshift and Loneliness_ is scrawled across the top of the page in a different ink color than the rest, an afterthought. They stare down at the words with disdain. “This is stupid,” they mutter. I rest my hand over theirs as their fingers take the top edge and threaten to tear the paper in half.

“It isn’t,” I say desperately, “it’s really beautiful.”

Morning intrudes on us uninvited, the sun leering over the horizon. They pause and look down at our hands together, and then they say, “Thanks.”

“Of course. I mean it.”

Gently, they fold the page in half and press it into my hand. “You can have this one, too,” they say, “but the next one will be better.”

 _Redshift and Loneliness_ is nothing but a thin piece of college-ruled notebook paper stained with pen, but it feels heavy when I hold it, it feels like something more. I clutch it to my chest and I tell them, “thank you,” very softly.

Love wells up within me, fills my lungs, floods my heart, rests on the tip of my tongue but goes no further. I choke it back down.

 _Not yet,_ I’m thinking, because I’m naive enough to believe I will have so many more chances, _not yet._

I open my eyes and groan, rolling onto my side and shielding my face from the sun. The room is the same cluttered mess it’s been for months, piles of clothing and empty soda cans scattered across the floor, unfinished assignments in stacks on my desk beside books I was supposed to have read last week.

It’s silent and empty and there is no stranger standing at the foot of the bed waiting for me to wake, no trace of what must’ve been a dream, and I’m unsurprised but disappointed. I’m left with lingering doubts and gnawing uncertainty, not because it felt so real it must’ve happened, but because it would have been something to hold onto and look forward to and work towards. The oak tree’s leaves are coming back green, and I don’t know how I’ll face it alone.

There’s isn’t a single trace of him left anywhere in the apartment, and I look, sifting through the bed sheets and pausing in the entryway where we’d spoken the night before. All I have is the memory of someone who quietly vanished, again.

I drag out of bed and into the bathroom to get ready for the day, but I pause when I look into the mirror, I stop, I look and I look again and I blink and I rub my eyes, I hear my heartbeat loud in my ears.

(“Anything,” he purred. “That’s a dangerous thing to say if you don’t mean it.”

“I mean it,” I insisted, “I’ll do anything.”

He shifted again in a flickering haze, reclaimed their face as his own, and he could only feign mercy because of that, could only imitate anything resembling kindness because he looked like the kindest person I had ever known. When he smiled in their image, their beautiful eyes grew colder. “You’re really serious about this,” he said on the verge of laughter.

“Just tell me what I’m supposed to do,” I demanded. “You’re some kind of monster, right, like a demon or whatever? What are the rules for this kind of thing? Do you want my soul or something?”

He chuckled, shaking his head. “You think can think of me as a monster, if you’d like, but I’m no demon.” He placed his open palm on my chest, fingers splayed, and my breath caught in my throat at the feeling of hands I had desperately missed touching me. “My name is Cain. There are no rules but the ones I make. I can do whatever I like, but I do nothing for free.”

“Then tell me what you want.”

Cain looked immensely pleased with himself, leaning forward, close enough that I had to look into eyes that were haunting me in grayscale with “ _missing since February”_ printed beneath them, and I was frozen for a moment, tears welling up at the sight of them so close to me. He put a hand--their hand--on my shoulder, gently, and then without warning, shoved me to the floor.

“I want to see just how far you’ll go,” he said, looming over me with an amused smile. “I want to see how far this devotion to your lover extends, where the limits of your resolve are. I want to test you.” He knelt before me, ran his hand up my chest, and wrapped his fingers around my throat as he came close enough for me to feel his breath on my lips. “I want to break you,” he said, and then he squeezed.

I panicked at the sudden sensation of breathlessness, hands flying to his wrists, hesitating an extra moment to dig my nails in because it was their skin I was touching. It didn’t matter when I finally did, the burning ache in my lungs too much to bear; he wore their smile, tauntingly gentle, and watched me struggle.

“What I want,” he said, “is a bit of entertainment. I’m going to put you through trials that will peel back everything you think you know about yourself and this world and the person you love, and show you what’s real.”

Just as my vision began to darken at the edges and his voice began to grow muffled, he released me. I fell back against the floor, coughing and rubbing my sore throat. “Trials?” I repeated hoarsely. “How...how many?”

He raised a brow. “As many as I tell you to do.”

“But there is an end, right?” I fought to keep the desperation out of my voice. “This isn’t a trick. You really will bring them back if I pass all of your tests?”

“There is an end to everything,” he promised. “Either you will bring about an end to my boredom, or I will find the limits of your perseverance.” His eyes narrowed as he smiled, wider this time, and I fought the fear that gripped me. “We’ll just have to see who works faster, won’t we?”)

Fading marks wrap around my throat in the shape of delicate, gentle fingers, ones I’ve dreamed of holding, dreamed of touching me.

But not like this.

*

In Rubens’ _Cain Slaying Abel_ , the elder brother has one hand raised above his head brandishing a club, while the other is wrapped around Abel’s throat, casting a shadow over a face marred with fear and confusion, the pain of betrayal. The bible is sparse in details, but I imagine he is remorseless.

_“My punishment is more than I can bear. Today you are driving me from the land, and I will be hidden from your presence; I will be a restless wanderer on the earth, and whoever finds me will kill me.”_

_“How could you?”_ he is saying instead of, _“I’m sorry.”_

A stack of books from the university library sit on the cafe table beside a cooling cup of hot chocolate. Most of it is religious anthropology, a cross-section of biblical studies and scholarly interpretations spanning hundreds of years, but there are also texts on historical artwork, renaissance paintings and church murals. I’m only guessing, really, only groping blindly in the dark for an answer, but I don’t know what else to think.

The first murder plays before my eyes each time I turn the page, Cain clutching Abel and Abel gazing up at Cain, many a silent, _“How could you?”_ trapped within the silence of the paintings.

I rest my elbows on the table and massage my temples, the pictures all blurring together in my exhaustion. I think I might be chasing ghosts again, looking for something that isn’t there. It could still be a dream, after all, I could have imagined the whole thing, the stress and the anxiety and the crushing hopelessness playing tricks on my mind.

I touch my fingertips to my throat absently, torn about what to believe. It could have been someone else, but it could just as easily have been something I did to myself; it wouldn’t be the first time.

“Cain and Abel, huh?” I hear, and glance up at a man standing behind me and looking over my shoulder, squinting at the painting.

“Yeah,” I say, startled. I pick up the book to hand it to him but he stops me, sliding into the open seat across the table. I shift uncomfortably in my chair. His eyes are a vivid, almost unnerving shade of green. “Um. Did you want the book?”

“No,” he says. “Just curious.” He goes through the pile, glancing at the covers, flipping through a few pages. “Doing research?”

“Pretty much,” I say, and add after a bit of hesitation, “It’s for a paper.”

He leans over the table, one brow raised. “What’s the topic?”

(I had just gotten to my feet, bracing myself against the wall, when Cain suddenly said, “You know, I’ve just thought of a rule.”

I watched him carefully, but he didn’t move. “What is it?”

The face of the person I loved smiled gently and lovingly, and I felt a tightness in my chest; he was getting better at imitating their gestures. “You can’t tell anyone about this. If I find out that you have, you’ll be punished for the transgression.”)

“The literary significance of the Cain and Abel story,” I say carefully.

He doesn’t look convinced. “Some people think Cain wasn’t Adam’s son,” he says.

I frown, confused. “Really? I’ve never heard that before. Where’d you read that?”

“I didn’t say it was true, just that some people think that.” When I look carefully, I see that he’s regarding me with worry. “There’s a lot of things about him that are poorly understood.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

He reached into his pocket, took out a pen and tore off the corner of a notebook page despite my frown, writing something down. He took my hand and held my gaze as he pressed it into my palm. “I’m a priest,” he says, “and you look like you need help.”

I glance down at the string of numbers he’d written, and then back up at him, conflicted, but he’s already leaving, sliding out of his seat and stepping around the table. “If you wanna talk, just call,” he says simply, and then he’s gone before I can stop him, slipping out of the cafe and into a crowd.

*

I return home with a handful of new homework assignments and a million unanswered questions, though one in particular sticks out from the rest when I turn on the light in my room and find Cain sitting on my bed with a book in his hands, and he isn’t hiding behind the face the person I love anymore, hair dark with a shock of red.

“Danielewski,” he says as if to explain himself, snapping the book shut and setting it aside. “Not much for the classics, are you? Your taste in literature hardly goes back fifty years.”

I sit down at my desk and face away from him, trying to organize the sea of papers strewn across it. “You like to read?” I mutter. “Of course you do. It’s not enough that you can look like them, you have to act like them, too.”

He smiles broadly. “They didn’t care much for reading, though, did they?” he asks. “Like so much of what they did, it was only to humor you.”

I frown tightly and try to ignore the burning sensation of tears beginning to form, tearing my gaze away from him.

“I told you,” he says, “I know everything about you, and consequently, about what you’ve lost, too.”

I don’t look up when I hear the bed shift and footsteps approaching, but I jump when his hands land on my shoulders, the soft, barely-there weight unnervingly gentle. “You look dejected.”

“I had a bad day,” I say hollowly.

It isn’t a lie, nor is it particularly telling. Every day in recent memory has been bad.

Cain’s right hand smooths over my torso, touching my collarbones peeking out of my shirt. “You haven’t been eating or sleeping well. Your complexion is poor,” he says, gentle fingers going lower, trailing over my abdomen. He grips my shoulder with his left hand, chuckling against my ear. “And you’re so _sensitive_.”

I tug myself free and swing my arms back but feel only empty air. When I turn around, Cain is standing a safe distance away. “Don’t,” I stammer, “don’t touch me.”

He glances at me with an unreadable expression, silent for a moment, and then he says, “I’m going to give you your first trial.”

I swallow nervously, setting the books aside and give him my full attention. “Oh,” I say, hoping I don’t sound as nervous as I feel. “When?”

Cain extends a hand. “Right now, if you’re ready.”

“What do I do?”

I’m met with a chilling smile. “What fun would it be if I told you now?”

I take a deep breath. I’m long past the point of no return; if this is a dream, a delusion, just something I imagine at the end of the day, then so be it.

If it isn’t, then I can’t afford to make any mistakes.

Hesitantly, I take the hand offered, and let Cain pull me to my feet. 

The world darkens all around us.


End file.
